Clash of the Titans - Television
The invention of the television disrupted many industries. Two men pursued the goal of bringing this gadget to the world. In some ways both won!
Born in 1891, David Sarnoff emigrated to the US in 1900 from what is now Belarus. His father had moved to the US and brought the rest of his family over.
Today this practice is called Chain Migration.
He helped out his family in New York by selling newspapers. His father passed in 1906. While he had planned a career in the newspaper business, he took up a job as an office boy at the Commercial Cable Company. He switched and moved to the Marconi Wireless and Telegraph Company of America.
In the 1900s, you could still rise in an organisation without paying a ransom to an Ivy League college.
He rose from Office boy to Commercial Manager. He led many of the deployments for the Marconi company on land and sea. He was sent out with two operators to confirm the fate of the Titanic. While all of the work the Marconi Company was engaged in was meant for point-to-point communication, Sarnoff saw the potential to expand that into point-to-mass communication.
When General Electric acquired the Marconi company, it was reorganised and rechristened, Radio Corporation of America (RCA).
Sarnoff pushed the company to get into the Radio transmission, but he was rebuffed. He then organised the broadcast of the boxing match between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier in July 1921. The success of the broadcast resulted in further interest in radio; by 1922, Radio was starting to see a boom.
In 1925, RCA bought a radio station in New York and launched the National Broadcasting Company (NBC).
Four years later, Sarnoff became the president of RCA.
In 1930, a new technology was under experimentation. The idea was to use the same waves over which sound was being broadcast, to broadcast pictures. He met an engineer in Westinghouse, Vladimir Zworykin in 1928. Zworykin promised Sarnoff a working television with a mere investment of $100,000. The potential of the television was clear to Sarnoff. Sarnoff bit at the offer and started funding the venture.
The year Sarnoff’s father died, Philo Farnsworth was born to a Latter-day Saint couple in Beaver, Utah. His parents were engaged in farming and hauling freight with their horse-drawn carriage. At the age of 12, he found that the house that they moved into had electric wiring and a broken generator. He set about fixing it. He learnt both mechanical and electrical engineering and turned his mother’s hand-powered washing machine into an electric washing machine.
At that age, attending Rigby High School, he discussed with his science teacher the possibility of creating an electric television and drew diagrams to show him how.
In 1923, his family moved to Provo, Utah and he joined the Brigham Young High School. He started taking advanced courses in science and started working on his idea of a television. He left Provo to go to Salt Lake City and start a radio repair business, which failed. By happenstance, he met two San Francisco philanthropists, who agreed to fund his television project.
By 1927, he had worked on various innovations to deliver the Electronic Television. A glass slide backlit by an arc lamp. By 1928, it had been fine-tuned sufficiently to be demonstrated to the press.
Zworykin had visited the labs of Philo Farnsworth and had put his team to work on creating a replica of the product. By 1930, Farnsworth had applied for a patent for his television.
Zworykin's venture had been ballooning in cost and was yet to deliver a working television. From a price tag of $100,000, the research effort had taken up 10s of millions and would eventually finish at a figure of $50 million.
Sarnoff offered to buy out Farnsworth’s patents for $100,000 with a stipulation that he become an employee of RCA, but Farnsworth refused.
Farnsworth set out to raise capital for his venture from across the Atlantic. He travelled to England looking for capital. In the meantime, Zworykin was on the verge of making the television work having seen all he had at the Farnsworth laboratory.
A patent battle was brewing. RCA sued Farnsworth for infringing on its patent of a transmitter tube. They claimed priority from 1923, although they could not offer any proof that they had a working model before 1931. In 1934, Farnsworth finally won the lawsuit which granted him $1,000,000 in a multi-year licensing agreement. This did not end the matter though. There were other patent clashes between the two, which were finally settled when Sarnoff agreed to pay a royalty to Farnsworth.
RCA was free to use the patent now and made a big splash at the New York Worlds Fair in 1939.
Farnsworth’s company was acquired by International Telephone and Telegraph in 1951.
RCA became the market leader in televisions.
Sarnoff was tapped by the US government during the Second World War to serve on Eisenhower’s communication staff.
He would go on to fend off the attack from CBS when the technology shifted towards colour television in the 1950s. Within 15 years of Sarnoff’s death, RCA would be defunct and sold for pieces.
Farnsworth would go on to work on several innovations in the area of defence and also take a stab at Fusion Energy. But none of his later ventures yielded him much. He died a bitter drunk.